Naming the Dead

I was at my desk in Philadelphia on Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, when my email went down.

It was about a quarter to nine. Email was hosted in our New York office, and it was not unusual to lose it briefly when a server dropped its network connection or had to be restarted for some reason. I growled and went to the workroom for coffee.

There was a television there, tuned to CNN. It showed an airliner being driven through the window of my office in New York.

I called my boss, Brad. Like most of our more senior people he had a cell phone. (The rest of us were getting a new form of cutting-edge communications tech: AOL Text Pagers.) I reached him at his home. I told him, "A plane just flew into the north tower of World Trade."

"You’re kidding. Which building is that?" he asked.

"That's World Trade One. That's us." I answered.

Ordinarily at that time on a Tuesday I would have been on a PATH train approaching the World Trade Center station, but I had changed my schedule that week. I had gone up on Monday instead, to start Scott, a new employee. Scott was in his early 30s, infectiously energetic, eager to get through the first-day-of-work formalities and dig into his new job. He had a big smile that crinkled his eyes; in a job that consisted largely of convincing people to prepare for things they didn’t even want to think about, I knew he would excel. He asked my permission to start his days early, at 8:00, so he could leave work early enough to spend time with his two- and four-year old boys between preschool and bedtime. I was glad to give him that permission.

So I was in Philadelphia on Tuesday morning, and Scott was murdered by terrorists on his second day of work. Dead, just like that.

The other two members of my small team died with him.

Joel was about ten years older than I, with many more years of experience in the field than I had. He didn’t hanker to lead the team, but he helped me get my feet under me. He looked, and was, studious. Soft voiced, bald on top, his wire-rimmed glasses often hid glints of mischief, and his gray mustache masked how often he smiled. Dead, just like that.

Carol was an administrative assistant who supported our small group and several others. She was kind, diligent, and quiet. She talked with me sometimes about her mother, who was old and failing. I learned much later that Carol was a third order Franciscan, but even not knowing that I recognized her simplicity, the joy she took in small things. Dead, just like that.

All that, and it was time for me to get to work.

I am a disaster recovery planner. I had been recruited to lead disaster recovery planning at Marsh USA in June 2001. Marsh is the insurance services subsidiary of Marsh McLennan, or MMC. My previous position had been at MMC’s reinsurance services company, Guy Carpenter. In Philadelphia, the Marsh and Guy Carpenter offices were a few floors apart in the same building. In New York City, Guy Carpenter had offices and a medium-sized data center in the World Trade Center, about halfway up Tower Two (the south tower), Marsh had a larger office and a major data center near the top of Tower One, and MMC’s headquarters were in midtown. My role at Marsh was “IT DR,” that is, Information Technology Disaster Recovery. When Something Bad happens, the Business Continuity folks worry about the people, and I worry about the computers. My work required frequent trips to the World Trade Center, and I had a cube there in the Marsh office in Tower One.

Brad asked me to try to get hold of someone on site, to get some kind of an impact assessment. He told me later that he thought it had been one of the light aircraft that fly tourists up and down the Hudson, and that often passed our 97th floor offices at eye level.

Fifteen minutes later, the second plane flew into Tower Two. Ian Fleming’s phrase flashed through my mind: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence … “Twice is enough,” I thought. “This is enemy action.”

I tried, and of course failed, to reach Joel in World Trade. But other status checks took place spontaneously.

My son, Alex, called from his middle school to make sure I was ok. I told him I was safe in Philadelphia. My wife was taking a week’s beach vacation in Delaware before starting a new job, and I was unable to reach her. I asked Alex to keep trying. Once he succeeded, it took him a while to convince her what he was telling her was real. She gave Dover Air Force Base a wide berth on her way home.

During that first day, I went downstairs from the Philadelphia Marsh office to Guy Carpenter, to talk with Chuck, their Operations Officer, about what we would need to do to support the Guy Carpenter recovery crew. My friend Mary Ivy passed his open door and, without either of us consciously crossing the intervening space, we were in each other’s arms.

This was not typical for us. A couple of weeks later, The Onion would report “Hugging Up 76,000 Percent.” (The Onion, volume 37, issue 34, p. 1.)

It takes about 30 seconds to go down one floor – two flights of stairs – in an office building’s fire tower. After 20 floors, even an active person begins to feel it. After 50 floors, you have shin splints. Call it an hour to get down from the top of World Trade, half an hour from the 50th floor. Within an hour and 42 minutes of the attack, both World Trade Center towers had collapsed.

That did not leave a lot of time to evacuate from an upper floor, even with stairways not blocked by flame and debris. But that is exactly what Paul, the Guy Carpenter CIO did, walking down from the mid-50s of the South Tower to ground level, and then heading grimly uptown, on foot, to the assembly point at corporate headquarters.

The Guy Carpenter people in Tower Two got out safely, in part because they were below the impact area, but mostly because many of them had been through the first terrorist bombing of World Trade in 1993. They knew the attack was real, and ignored instructions from the Port Authority to shelter in place. I have heard more than one story of an older colleague taking a younger one by the hand, and saying, “You’re coming with me.”

That evening, Paul held a teleconference for his entire staff. He conducted no business until he had heard the voice every single person. I don’t think Paul could imagine handling things any other way. We cheered when the last, embarrassed, attendee dialed in. We were all alive and safe.

Other corporate responses were less humane than Paul’s. Although HR later created web pages on which we could post sightings (“I saw Fred and talked to him.” “I talked to Jean on the phone last night.”) we were told not to name the dead, and for weeks there was no list of them. I was happy to comply. It protected me from realities I did not want to face, like Scott’s wife with her two young sons on Brad’s lawn that night, screaming to be told what had happened to him.

Brad and I agreed that I should stay in Philadelphia to help with the Guy Carpenter recovery, since I was more familiar with their systems and their people. Shortly before my transfer to Marsh, I had determined that a lot of Guy Carpenter’s essential software installation media were not kept off site. Maintaining copies of such vital records in a second location is a disaster recovery fundamental, so I begged, wheedled, whined, and made myself an unbearable nuisance until I had collected software CDs for all our critical systems. I crammed them into my overnight bag and took them to Philadelphia, where we stored them in the computer room. With this background, it just seemed to make sense for me to be there with the people and systems I knew.

Nevertheless, before I went to work with the Guy Carpenter team in Philadelphia on Wednesday morning, I packed a bag. Once at work, I got a loaner mobile phone issued to me. Sure enough, Brad called me from the Marsh recovery site in North Jersey. He needed my help there.

We had contracted with a recovery services company, COMDISCO, for what are called “shared recovery resources.” That means that multiple companies contract for the use of the same computers for DR, on the assumption that it is unlikely that they will all experience disasters at the same time. That proved to be a bad assumption.

The contract addressed the possibility that multiple clients would declare a disaster concurrently by promising to assign resources based on the order in which the declarations were received. One of my first actions on Tuesday morning was to get on the phone to declare a disaster on each of our contracts.

The declaration process broke down under the volume of calls, and the order in which declarations were received was lost. We did eventually get all the servers we needed. They never gave us all the user workstations we wanted.

The Marsh recovery process was managed from England, since they were not hampered by the loss of systems, infrastructure, and people as we were in the U.S. Thirty or more people would meet on conference calls several times a day, where progress would be reported, and next steps identified and assigned. I left these calls with a legal pad on which I had written out my own list of actions, and then went from room to room in the recovery site, passing instructions and getting status updates and resource requests from the various recovery teams.

Once a janitor stopped me. “What is on these pads you all carry?” he asked. I looked around the corridor. Easily twenty people from different companies were doing exactly what I was doing.

“Lists,” I told him. “Lists of things to do. Lists.”

But there was no list of the dead.

Our wide area network connected our global user population to the servers at the COMDISCO IT recovery site. However, there was only enough bandwidth to run a few test sessions on the recovered applications, not enough to support a full workload.

Even in 2001, email was among our most critical applications. By Thursday we had recovered the email servers at COMDISCO. But how could we get around the network problem?

Our corporate headquarters in Midtown Manhattan had both upgradable network bandwidth and enough raised floor space to host the email servers, if we could get them there. We solved the network problem by buying the servers and moving them to midtown.

By this time the Lincoln tunnel was open, though security was tight, and the police were nervous. So was I, when I signed a purchase agreement for just over a million dollars’ worth of uninsured equipment to be transported in a cheap rental van into New York past heavily armed police.

Grief did not stop John, an IT project manager, from renting the van and driving it. Like me, had previously been issued an AOL text pager. So had his best friend, who worked in the data center high in Tower One. There was no route down. “I’m standing on a wing!” his friend had texted. And later, “The smoke is getting pretty bad.”

John and I now both had cell phones. After we loaded the servers onto the truck and secured them, I told him, “You will call me when you enter the tunnel. You will call me when you exit the tunnel. You will call me when you reach the loading dock.” My log shows that on Friday September 14 at 00:45 he entered the Lincoln Tunnel. By 01:00 he was at the loading dock.

There were less grim moments. On a teleconference late on Wednesday, one of the Guy Carpenter tech leads said to me, “Remember how you were after my ass to get you software, and got me really pissed, and just kept after me anyway?”

“Yes,” I said cautiously.

“Thank you,” he said.

Another member of that team told me years later about going into the Philadelphia computer room and finding all the software they needed. “Chests full of CDs,” he said. I like that word “chests.” It transforms a drab computer room into Ali Baba’s cave.

The headquarters building did not have the resources to host all the servers we needed, but we had a data center in Massachusetts that had a large number of servers that were just about to be decommissioned. Although they did not have enough tape drives to perform the high volume restores we needed for recovery, they did have plenty of network capacity, power, and HVAC.

We restored the servers’ data from backup tapes at COMDISCO in New Jersey, compressed it, and transferred it across the network to Massachusetts, where it was decompressed and brought on line.

Thursday or Friday night I walked into the console room at COMDISCO. The lights were off, and the only illumination was from the consoles themselves. Five or six red-eyed system administrators were there. Each step in the process was slow, and had to be monitored. While they waited and watched, they browsed websites. Although the company did not publish a list of the dead, newspapers and the City did. They were looking for the names of their friends.

We had a lot of survivors from World Trade who needed a place for their desks. We found it in a new building, being built across the Hudson River in Hoboken, NJ. We moved into the new space in 2003.

The World Trade Center Memorial was dedicated on September 11, 2011.

In December 2014, a colleague invited me to guest-lecture at his business continuity class at NYU. On the way, I visited the Memorial for the first time. I entered the plaza where the towers had stood, and my heart was taken away.

The memorial for each tower is a pit, evocative of the foundation for each building. A wall of water plunges down each side to fall in a pool that covers the floor. In the center is a hollow square, and the pool rushes down into that; you do not see it reach bottom. The words to describe it are also the feeling it evokes: bottomless sorrow. The names of the people who died in each building are cut in metal plates mounted on the walls around the pits. My fingers found their names.

Carol. Scott. Joel.

Walter Lawn is a professional IT disaster recovery planner. He has also had published his fiction and poetry, most recently at On the Run Press and Lily Poetry Review.